Mid Life Celebration readers, I am pleased to introduce our Guest Blogger, Lorie Sheffer, from York, Pennsylvania. Lorie and I graduated from Spring Grove Area High School in 1997 1977. Lorie has a spin on midlife that will entertain and enlighten you. You are in for a treat. Take it away Lorie….
My email box usually contains at least one “Stupid, clueless men” joke a week, sent by my gal pals. The most recent: Q: What is gross stupidity? A: 144 men in one room.
This is one of the kinder jokes. Most involve man parts and the use/misuse of said parts. I’m not so politically correct or dishonest as to say some of this stuff isn’t pretty darned funny. But underneath it all there is this undercurrent of a battle of the sexes as to who has it rougher, especially when it comes to aging. As a woman who has always had male friends, I seem to find myself defending men more and more often these days.
I was out shopping with my grandson a few years ago and the check out girl at the grocery store, when speaking to him, referred to me as “Mom”. “She’s my grandmother”, Carter corrected her. I actually looked into that sweet little face of his and asked him to “Shut it!” Actually, since I am trying to be honest, it was more of a hiss. Was I becoming so age obsessed that I had hoped if some kid who had an after school job checking groceries mistook grandma for mom that magically made it so? As if “Grandmother” is a dirty word. No wonder my grandson looked puzzled. To a small child, Grandma equals magic!
This was about the time the realization hit me. We women are so obsessed with our changing hormones and expanding waist, our hot flashes and our mood swings, we seem to forget that aging is no picnic for the men, either. We tend to talk about it, while men seem to remain quiet for fear of appearing weak. Notice what the overwhelming theme of the commercials are when “guy shows” are on TV. They usually involve a 50-something couple in claw foot bathtubs (I still don’t understand the tubs), baby boomers giving one another “that look” before dancing down the hallway toward the bedroom, or my personal favorite, the teenaged girls advising newly divorced Dad he would be dateable if he used some man-color on that gray hair of his. (Maybe someone should tell Mr. Clooney and Mr. Gere they would be attractive to women if only they hit the Grecian Formula.)
I honest to God have a male friend who colors his chest hair to cover the gray. If men aren’t lucky enough to have hair TO color, then surely they can send for some Rogain. Because, grand sense of humor that God seems to have, men start to lose hair where they want it around the same time women sprout hair in places that send them running to the waxing salons in droves.
Our age group is being bombarded by an industry that is literally making billions of dollars by playing to our insecurities, when in fact most times all you need is some dim light and a little patience. Most men would be thrilled to have their wives call them sexy or hot of whatever words we use to describe the above-mentioned George and Richard. I would be willing to bet most men are so concerned with their own age related issues that they don’t notice if our legs (or chins) are freshly shaved.
Test it out; say something nice to your significant other. Give a genuine compliment once a day, and let them know you appreciate them. Really, I think that’s all any of us wants. Maybe if we all just stepped outside of ourselves and tried to see through the eyes of the opposite sex, we would realize that we all have our issues. We’re in this together.
A friend sent me an email forward photo of a pretty teenaged girl, circa 1968; below the photo was the question, “Where are the cute hippie girls from the 60s?”
I scrolled down to another photo, this of a totally naked, very overweight, out shape, gray haired woman in her 60s. She was covered with stretched out and faded tattoos of Woodstock era images. She wore only flip-flops as she walked down the street, head held high. Amazingly, she looked happy.
Humor goes a long way, so long as the object of the joke is laughing WITH us. As Robert Browning wrote over a century ago, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be.”
As we get older, life, it seems, becomes increasingly filled with commitments and responsibilities. Most days I find myself running from one task to the next: eating lunch in my car as I frantically run errands over my lunch break, squeezing in phone calls to family and friends during my ten minute drive to work, and agonizing over work assignments and deadlines while I sleep. My car is my virtual office, my Facebook page is my only connection to my loved ones and I tend to think of life in key strokes, wishing I could CTRL + Z (undo) my error in judgement the other night when I added too much detergent to the laundry and found myself swimming in a sea of bubbles. Sometimes it feels like my mind and body never truly rest. And I’m not even 30.
Former CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises, Brian G. Dyson, describes it best, “Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”
So how can we all do a better job of maintaining balance in our lives? Here are a five simple rules I try to live by:
Decide what’s most important in your life and don’t take those things for granted.
Learn the beauty and the power of the word “no.”
Respect your time; don’t waste it on things that don’t matter to you.
Do your best and learn to accept when that’s just not enough.
Some simple numbers to show the possibilities when giving up isn’t an option, and neither is dreaming small dreams.
30,000+: Number of Monthly Visits
Five: Number of Daily blogs written
200: jeffnoelmidlife You Tubes uploaded, in past 8 months
Hundreds of thousands of Monthly Page Views
First: Google Page display for all five blogs
Last: Where I want to be (humble, least, meek)
Raising enough money to find a cure for an incurable disease.
Impossible is nothing.
Thank you for your visits. There are enormous plans for Mid Life Celebration. This is just the beginning. Together, we can and will help shape the world in a way that teaches young children personal responsibility, beginning in elementary schools.
Mid Life Dreams. We all have them. We all like them. We all want them to come true.
This is probably where we take a wrong turn. Somewhere. Somehow. It happens.
But we are completely unaware. For a long time. A really long time. Maybe a couple decades.
We somehow miss the turn, get lost, and then end up at the proverbial midlife crisis.
It’s a ton of work to overcome decades of status quo.
It’s a ton of work to start a business. It’s a ton of work to get healthy and stay healthy. It’s a ton of work to save enough for retirement. It’s a ton of work to have a peaceful and contented spirit.
Everything is a ton of work.
It’s very similar to the early pioneers. This is the follow up video to the one from a few weeks ago. It was the burning sunset that prompted me to stop.
Unscripted and one-take, the way You Tube videos are traditionally done.
Harvard Business Review simply says this, in reference to the proverbial mid life crisis:
“A growing number of researchers are defining middle age more broadly and in positive terms, as a good time to reassess life goals and chart a new course.”
“Midlife is your best and last chance to become the real you,” declared an article on the topic last year in the Harvard Business Review, which drew thousands of emails in response, says co-author Carlo Strenger, an associate professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a researcher and consultant on midlife change.”
It’s simple.
We go through life and most of us mess it up. We get a second chance.
Midlife heartbreak or midlife opportunity. Pretty simple. Two choices. You get to pick one.
If you and your spouse (and yes, want to acknowledge some readers will not be parents), worked hard all your life and played by the rules, and you gave birth to a child without eyes and never able to walk, which would you pick?
Mid Life heartache or mid life opportunity?
Well, there was a Family that had to make this choice. They were featured on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as well as numerous other media pieces, including a heartwarming You Tube Video feature, about 6 minutes long, available at the end of this post.
One of my “secrets” to unspeakable joy is the daily effort to read, listen, watch, experience, think, do and reflect on the countless blessings that surround my ordinary life.
You have all these blessings too. But in order to feel the Peace and Contentment that are the fruit of these blessings, you must become fully aware.
You must become willing to invest time everyday. Even if it’s only six minutes. Will today be another day to postpone your new beginning?
Hardly. I was 21. A senior in college, and a dreamer.
There was a movie that shaped the mid life celebration vision. A mother was videotaping herself while she spoke to her unborn child.
She was dying of cancer and would never meet her child.
She wanted her child to be able to see and hear, directly from the video tapes, what she wished for her child and what she thought her child might want to know about their mother.
It was in the following days, on the lazy, sunny, fall days in West Chester, Pennsylvania that I dreamt of writing a book for my children.
The book would contain all the secrets of life, learned through books, travels and experiences.
While the Mid Life Celebration website is two years old, the name and vision are the same, what’s morphed is Mid Life Celebration’s purpose.
And it’s more exciting than I could have ever imagined 30 years ago. Ever feel like that?
Do you have important dreams from long ago that are more exciting today than when you first dreamt them?
How did you go about keeping them alive all these years? Or, how did you go about reigniting the flames?
Have you ever done something you weren’t supposed to do? And in order to do it, you had to do it in a sneaky way? And often, there was a close friend who had already done the thing, and they helped you?
Smoking, drinking, stealing, bad pranks, and so on.
Seriously, these are things adults do not make a conscious effort to teach children. Can you imagine a Mother saying, “Come here son, it’s time you learned how to smoke cigarettes.”
Heard a Chantix commercial last night. Chantix helps smokers quit. Let me set the scene:
Mom comes on saying, “I smoked a pack a day for 25 years. I could not quit smoking, no matter how hard I tried.”
Until one day……
“I told my son to promise me he would never start smoking.”
He said, “Promise me you’ll quit.”
And the Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon. Little boy blue and the man in the moon……he turned out just like me…..my boy was just like me….
